population of the world lives in an area where the threat of water security and then half of the people are in hospital beds are actually there because of the sickness that they had from water is just outstanding and obviously it's a huge problem that we're always have to focus on in the future peter laugher a director of water at c a r e thank you for joining me thank you and that's going to do it for now for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r.t. america i'll see you right back here at eight pm. you

know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything. you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture.

below and welcome to cross talk where all things are considered i'm peter lavelle ten years ago this week the united states and its so-called coalition of the willing invaded iraq the war was supposed to be a walk. in the park and pay for it so things turned out very differently a decade on what has been achieved any lessons learned and will anyone ever be held accountable for a war that should have never been fought in the first place. to cross off the war in iraq ten years on i'm joined by my guest in washington john glaser he's an editor at antiwar dot com we also have douglas elephant he is

a senior fellow at the new america foundation and a former director for iraq at the u.s. national security council and finally we cross to jeff mullard he is chair of the board at iraq veterans against the war cross talk rules in fact gentlemen that means you can jump in anytime you want john if i go to you first ten years on has the united states achieved any of its strategic goals it wanted back ten years ago no and what has to be remembered i mean the iraq war quite simply is the most horrendous thing my government has done in my lifetime it is the most egregious war crime of the twenty first century through a process of systematic manipulation of intelligence and outright lies to the american people the bush administration waged a war without the justification of self defense that makes it a war crime under international law. the supreme international crime in the words

of the nuremberg tribunal the true cost of the war will never be known although some valiant efforts have been made peer reviewed studies back in two thousand and six put the iraqi death count at six hundred fifty thousand. that's an unimaginable number we have almost five thousand troops dead and we have when the interest is considered on how much the war will cost because it was both fought with borrowed money it's on the order of six trillion dollars that's more than the g.d.p. g.d.p. of most countries so look. the biggest the biggest discovery this war is the fact that no bush administration official now or ever will be held accountable or brought to justice for the war crime that they committed in iraq and that's the big tragedy here ok douglas when you weigh in ok and anything positive ten years on. absolutely i think that the best summary i've read

this week is from leon wieseltier in the new republic who says that the iraq war began wrongly but ended rightly and i think that's where we're at i'm not recommending that we do anything like this again invading iraq was like drawing to an inside straight in poker or hitting seventeen or eighteen and blackjack just because it works out for you doesn't mean it was a good idea and doesn't mean you should do it again but iraq today is a parliamentary democracy its economy is recovering it has a very serious terrorism problem it has a capacity problem in terms of you know human capital and making its institutions work. but given its history of being under dictatorship having a bloody war with its neighbor then being under ten years of u.s. sanctions and then another almost ten years of civil war and occupation they're actually doing remarkably well today there are resilient people ok jeff jump in

resilient people and it's a democracy in iraq it's interesting go ahead. yeah i just love the fact that anyone can paint what's happening in iraq right now as a positive picture and that they can point to our involvement there is being positive the fact of the matter is is that we destroyed a country and to overlook that and say well it didn't start off the greatest i think that we need to return to the point that this was a war crime to start with and you can't say that we've made positive out of that we just took some lemons and made lemonade know it started with a war crime it's a war crime today and it's continuing of that matter and the fact that it's not over for u.s. veterans and for rocky's needs to be restated the fact that it's going to continue for us veterans like myself who continue to struggle with stress it's going to continue to affect iraqis who now have more than a fifty percent poverty rate in a country that had around

a ten percent poverty rate when this war began and that's after ten years the most brutal sanctions that this world has ever seen that's after decades of brutal dictator that's after the low point that that country had seen to date and now they're at even lower point because of that there's very few iraqis that would make the the argument that they're better off today than they were before this war crime started before the illegal and immoral invasion occupation of that country started and it's going to continue for u.s. troops who are now suffering through traumatic brain injury who are now suffering through military sexual trauma and post-traumatic stress who aren't being given the right to heal which is something that iraq veterans against the war is now fighting for for both iraqis and for for u.s. service members and i just think it's completely ludicrous for anyone out there to be arguing that there's something positive coming out of the biggest war crime that's ever happened in my generation right douglas you can the odd man out here do

you would you like to react to any of the. look just because you don't like the way this war started i i'm getting very very tired of hearing people who are understandably upset about two thousand and three therefore wanting iraq to fail wanting the iraqis to not have a viable state wanting to portray this as i mean what we want to do is make the iraqis suffer forever because two thousand and three was a really really bad idea and because lots of iraqis and lots of i got some good ideas about those events. so totally with that got like this is just as chronic awesome job to show go ahead jump in i've got some great solutions how about we step forward and actually start paying our iraqis some reparations how about we actually start taking taking some responsibility for the things we've done and start paying reparations for those things instead of washing our hands and saying that iraq is successful now which it's not we actually pay reparations for the damage we've done we actually rebuild the infrastructure in iraq that we helped to

destroy that we that we decimated the fact that there are so protests in iraq over clean water because there's not a clean water infrastructure there that there's not a electrical infrastructure there and that we decimated that country's infrastructure that we actually have a reparation system that goes into rebuilding that country how about that is a place to start and that we accept responsibility for the things that we've done and actually make right on those things instead of just saying ok we're good we can we can walk away now because the country has this functioning democracy which it really doesn't it has a system that we set up and i was there and took part in that and was there when we actually put that constitution in place and our military helped to put that constitution in place iraqis didn't write it we wrote it and i was there and took part in that so i know a little bit about it but the fact is i have is that we need to take responsibility for those things and actually pay reparations john jump in. you know yeah i have

some more ideas douglas seems a bit you know not an imaginative this morning so we have some more ideas how about also besides reparative reparations we also stop propping up the maliki government which i know douglas is a great advocate for but which happens to be continuing a process of ruining that country. he's beach drawing the country into a dictatorship he's. you know strengthening the sectarian tensions in the country he's rounding up his political opponents and throwing them in secret torture prisons without charge or trial the man is a thug and he's in power in part because we put him there and the country is not doing well it's not a democracy yes it has a parliament but that's meaningless when you consider the political realities of the country so besides reparations we ought to be drawing back support and stop supporting him and propping up

a dictatorship douglas lott said there i'm always interested when people think that we should be pushing out you know elected officials in other countries i really thought we were out of that business look they're having elections now we're going to have this trial elections in iraq next month let's see how that works out difference if maliki's party starts to lose power loses power and he's going to have to stand parliamentary and i was not in support of the i was our full parliamentary elections and i reckon twenty fourteen let's see what happens john go ahead jump in. yes let's see what happens and stop supporting whatever side happens to win stop arming the iraqi government with tens of billions of dollars worth of lockheed martin's and raytheon's production equipment and stop sending them taxpayer dollars on the order of one to two billion dollars a year they don't deserve our money they are oppressing their people and it is

a terrible add on to the greatest war crime of the twenty first century to continue intervening in that country when we are not wanted we are not morally justified from doing so the interventionism from people like douglas who have such an insatiable need to intervene in every corner of the world especially resource rich corners of the world that are jews to treated equally important is really a thing to be hold i mean after all the disasters that iraq contained because of the us invasion and by the way the sanctioning a no fly zones before that in the one nine hundred ninety s. he still wants to continue to intervene in that country it's amazing to me i'm sorry that he's tired of hearing these criticisms but this is why we need to keep saying that douglas go ahead before we go to the break on confuse one of them wants me to intervene more with more money and the other one it wants us to intervene less with less money so maybe we can find some medium the iraqis don't need our

money they've got plenty of oil money they only got what money o. money and a lot of money but my reading is to a lot of money went into we keep getting upset with them that they're not stopping iranian overflights and yet they have no air force what are they supposed to do throw rocks at it they need to have they are entitled to have a legitimate military for legitimate self-defense it's a rough neighborhood and they have some nasty neighbors ok jeff right before the break go ahead. well let me be clear on what i mean when i talk about reparations what i what i mean is helping the iraqi government rebuild what we destroyed and taking responsibility for that sure not even being clear and taking responsibility for the fact that we destroyed this country illegally that we went in and destroyed the infrastructure of this country completely and illegally that we destroyed their electrical grid their water and people are dying to this day because of the illegal invasion right gentlemen i'm going to jump in here we're going to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on iraq stay

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welcome back to crossfire for all things are considered on peter lavelle to remind you we're discussing the invasion of iraq ten years on. ok douglas and i feel about you should anybody be held accountable for the an illegal invasion of iraq ten years ago i don't think so it was ten years ago why not why not you know i know as an ally and we need to move on why not. i think a lot of reasons have been already watch and on this program john what do you lying let's talk about iraq today i mean we can sit here and we can relate again two thousand and three all day will i want to talk about iraq today and what do you think what do you think that iraq today think about or place should be called

interventionist so show me somewhere in what i've written where i'm an interventionist i want to u.s. troops out of iraq as soon as possible root publicly that president obama needed to get us troops out of iraq that wasn't helpful i've never advocated intervention anywhere john what about you accountability i wonder i wonder how many convenience store thieves or drug dealers or first degree murder douglas would like to say in defense of let's not really to get the past when a crime has been committed the perpetrator is held accountable that's how the rule of law works ok the bush administration manipulated evidence and intelligence and lied to the american people insinuating that iraq and saddam hussein had some connection to al qaeda nine eleven which there was none and that they were they represented even the remotest threat to the united states which they did not and they justified it that way it legal war of aggression those are war crimes

in the words the nuremberg tribunal again they differ from other war crimes only in that they contain within themselves the accumulated evil of the whole these types of people who commit these types of crimes belong in a war crimes tribunal and probably should be hanged ok for douglas to simply say we shouldn't be litigating the past he sounds like someone in the obama administration moving forward by completely disregarding war crimes of the highest order jeff jump in accountability. i would simply say that. i have a very good friend right now thomas young who was shot several times. in iraq who recently entered hospice care and it's going to stop treatment. and is going to die in the next couple weeks and. he wants to see

some prosecution for the crimes that were committed and i think he deserves to see that and i think a lot of us who who for us the war isn't over we deserve to see accountability and that for rocky's who the war for them continues and for us that's for us the war continues we deserve that and we deserve someone to be held accountable for the crimes that have been committed and the next generation deserves it because eventually another leader is going to come along and start saying the same lies that led us into vietnam that led us into iraq if we don't start holding our leaders accountable there's going to be another generation in thirty or forty years that's going to try and lie us into what we all

their war you know douglas we don't we don't have to we don't have to wait that long and leaders we had all of that but we have syria ok my point is douglas has anything been learned. i think the wrong lessons are being learned we're now sitting on our hands and letting an atrocity unfold in syria you know we we have you know i would look iraq was going to wreck was a bad idea and no one is contesting that it's our generation's vietnam and you know it's totally poisons our politics the problem is we're now having our shredder uneek and rwanda come just a couple of years later in as we're sitting watching you know a humanitarian disaster unfold in syria john what about you. has anything been learned yeah the. there's lots of tragedies going on in syria but a much bigger tragedy would be for the united states to militarily intervene first of all in order to impose a no fly zone you'd have to first take out the assad regime's anti-aircraft

capabilities those are located in residential areas then you have to bomb those which will probably create more human suffering and death a bigger humanitarian crisis then we move in what do you want boots on the ground does he does he think for a second that the kind of sectarian bloodletting that occurred in iraq and that killed hundreds of thousands of people simply wouldn't occur in syria which has just as many complications in terms of sectarianism and and different religions and different people the rebel opposition has close links with al qaeda groups do we want to help bring them to power and then we can be supporting moloch a state terrorist a thug a dictator as well as. those who is technically on the state department's designation of official terrorist organizations. going into syria would be such a disaster that it's almost unspeakable and the fact that people like douglas and

other interventionist yes i'll use that word again claim that we ought to be going in and doing something about syria as if we can and if we ought to and as we have the legal and moral authority to proves that the lessons of iraq have not fully been learned ok douglas please reply you know it's always nice when you can call your own upon a name and put a label on him look at you know what sharia shows us is that iraq's problems were really of its own making saddam hussein you know representing a minority of the iraqis his minority sect faction ruled over iraq once he was gone and he was going to go whether we threw him out or an arab spring happened that was not that was not a stable regime that regime was going to. go at some point there was going to be an accounting as syria shows us when you have a minority ruling a majority it gets pretty ugly when that gets overturned so iraq was going to have this type of bloodletting when the when the genie was let out you know but then

that's the lesson we did with america there would be no american blood and regimes when they go down it's probably ok i don't understand the logic you have to tell america what i'll concede that ok jeff if you want to jump in then reply to that. i just i have no idea why that's an argument for the us war in iraq. i'm totally baffled by why that would be john john it looked like you wanted to jump in occupied look like you wanted to go if you want to jump in john go ahead. it's funny to me when he says the problems in iraq were of their own making i mean we supported saddam hussein with money and weapons in the one nine hundred eighty s. and the one nine hundred ninety s. after the first gulf war after we destroyed much of iraq's infrastructure we imposed an economic blockade on the country academic studies including the united nations have concluded that you know maybe a million people died including five hundred thousand children because the child

mortality rates skyrocketed when people couldn't get good you know clean water and good food they couldn't import the proper medicines this was. two and u.n. officials to u.n. on voice to iraq resigned in protest in the one nine hundred ninety s. because of how terrible the sanctions were one of them described it as genocidal we killed so many people in that country and destroyed the country's infrastructure even before we invaded in the illegal war of two thousand and three that the real war in iraq is more than two decades long and it's been led by the united states and to say that you know iraq's problems were their own i mean it is a radical misreading of history and it's just you know it's fine to say saddam was a bad guy no one defend saddam hussein but it has no bearing on whether or not the war was justified whether or not iraq would have been fine without us

interventionism douglas what kind of legacy does this leave the united states in the region ten years on do you think. it's deeply ambiguous look again no one's defending going into iraq it was not a good idea if i'm not clear about that it was not a good idea for us to invade iraq you have a cat he said you admitted it was crystal english phrase it was criminal a good thing that nasa because of bad decisions august you know it out next that's just the way the world war in iraq is now i'm in a board was going through harlem entry democracy the oil is flowing and we're going to see what happens in the next round of elections jeff go ahead jeff douglas admit douglas take that step then it wasn't just a bad idea it was criminal it was flat out a criminal act. douglas correct that's your opinion ok you don't that's his opinion no that's a header of international law that the bush administration knew that you know what

they were saying was it was not true well then he might have a point but the fact is everyone thought saddam hussein had nuclear or had a weapons of mass destruction program why i think some of these thought not everybody iranians are not entering the sport on this gentleman everyone invalid go ahead and wrong one hundred percent on that many many people knew that iraq had no weapons of mass destruction members of the bush administration i'm sure of it knew he didn't have met weapons of mass destruction the downing street memo if you read it contains information about the minutes but it's simply not true they said the intelligence was being fixed around a policy the policy was to invade iraq and regardless of what the intelligence said they were going to do it paul pillar the guy the cia officer who led the national intelligence estimate on iraq that flawed document that got so much wrong he said

that the he was for him and the cia were feeling pressure from the administration to justify the war with particular pieces of intelligence that would allow them the ability to do so he said they were they were feeling pressure john brennan the current ok john i want to be fair and i want to be fair to everyone douglas i want to give you the last word i want to be fair to everyone on this program douglas go ahead thirty seconds. well were there were minority views out there that thought that saddam did not have nuclear weapons that's absolutely true but the majority of opinion floating across doorless was in the mind in tehran as well as in washington was that he had them ok gentlemen heated debate thank you very much many thanks to my guests in washington d.c. and thanks to our viewers for watching us here i see an extraordinary number of crosstalk.

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